Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Several sites like Longreads and Medium suggest articles for you to read and also the approximate time to read each of those articles…4 minutes or whatever. Looks like now that metric has moved from the digital to the physical world, from articles to entire books: like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s book, Without Their Permission , it had the time-to-read number printed on the back : “5-hour read”! While Michelle Dean can see the use of such numbers in case of Internet articles: “I understand that we live in the kind of culture where we are scheduled down to the minute, where reading is a thing you fit into your spare time, which is typically the one hour you spend on the subway each day. So I understand needing to organize your time.” She doesn’t see the point of it in case of books. After all, she says: “It certainly isn’t to give you a true idea of what kind of investment is required to read the book.” Besides, she argues, doesn’t it just lead to a reading race wi...

“Join the conversation”: a byline on almost every news channel these days. Don’t just be a viewer, come be a viewer-commentator. Of course, this tendency extends beyond news channels and extends to almost all events today. Not everyone is a fan though. Some would like to have “Quiet Enjoyment”. Brent Cox describes this Shushers v/s Anti-Shushers debate as: “a chair fight masquerading as a robust conversation” As might be expected, the debate has a generational slant: “the Millennial-ish Anti-Shushers vs. the geezer Luddites”. But isn’t this desire to have a conversation about something you liked/ watched/ experienced deep rooted? “A characteristic of the way that we apparently always wanted to consume entertainment, however we arrived at it, involves the need to converse, the need to share, the need for at least the illusion of being heard.” The smartphone made it possible to do that regardless of whether you are at a stadium, a concert or in front of the idiot box...

Remember Autocorrect, the feature that corrects your errors as you type along? Sure, it often makes funny mistakes while correcting you (hence sites like Damn You Autocorrect!), but all in all a very useful thing. Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote this article on the history of autocorrect and points out that autocorrect was a necessary condition for the success of the touchscreen: “The whole notion of touchscreen typing, where our podgy physical fingers are expected to land with precision on tiny virtual keys, is viable only when we have some serious software to tidy up after us.” Kind of ironical that a feature that Microsoft came up with for MS Word became the foundation on which Apple built its empire! Once it started developing autocorrect, Microsoft realized it had to expand the standard dictionary…a lot. So it asked one its interns, Christopher Thorpe, to write a script that compiled all the manual entries that Microsoft employees had made to their custom dictionaries. Fas...

Ben Evans pulls some stats on the photos being shared via social networks: “Over 1.5bn new photos are shared every day on Facebook, WhatsApp and Snapchat alone, which equates to about 550bn a year…Total sharing across all social networks, if we include Wechat and other platforms, is certain to be over 1 trillion this year.” Wow! Nick Confalone wrote this very funny article describing his stay-at-home-dad experience with Vine, the video sharing app that restricts each video to just 6 seconds. It started off as fun, something to kill time: “My set would be our house. My supporting cast would be stuffed animals, a plastic giraffe named Sophie, and a 25-pound cat. My star, my muse, and my co-director would be my 3-month-old son.” The videos soon became popular. Among the reasons for his popularity: “Mom friends told me part of our appeal came from seeing what Dad does with the baby when Mom’s not around. I let him lick money (oops); I propped him up, but he fell over (oop...

My 3 year old daughter loves dinosaurs. All of them. The “good” ones like Barney and the “bad” ones from Jurassic Park and Godzilla . On that topic, she’s in the exalted company of Calvin and other, regular kids world-over who too are “caught up in the raging, teeth-baring grip of full-on dinomania”, as this article by Richard Conniff calls it. Soon after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, in 1861, the paleontologist, Hermann von Meyer, discovered a dinner plate-size fossil: “It seemed as if the proof of evolutionary theory had arrived, like the Ten Commandments, engraved in stone.” Von Meyer’s description of the fossil was that of a type of flying reptile. In 1964, John H. Ostrom, a Yale paleontologist discovered Deinonychus, a primitive bird that he said “must have been a fleet-footed, highly predaceous, extremely agile, and very active animal”. A couple of years later, when Ostrom was looking at the limestone slabs of von Meyer closely, he c...

Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, recently wrote a 3,100 words memo on the company’s new direction. It rambles on without any indication of how Microsoft intends to deal with the post-PC world that even Nadella acknowledges: “We live in a mobile-first and cloud-first world.” Microsoft is singularly badly placed to do anything about mobile. Here’s why: 1)       Their original plan had been to license the Windows Phone OS to manufacturers. Google destroyed that plan by making Android free. 2)      With nobody other than Nokia making Windows phones, Microsoft had to buy Nokia. Because Nokia was going bankrupt and also “defecting” to Android. 3)      Having refused to write Office apps for iOS and Android until very recently, they found that the mobile world had moved onto other editors. Or to non-Microsoft Office apps. Like the Polaris Office suite. 4)      Microsoft makes around $2 billion a ...

As my dad continued to insist that he wanted a keyboard for the iPad, I cringed. Nobody types much on an iPad, I said. The iPad is for surfing, viewing mails, watching videos and checking Facebook, I explained (which, by the way, is exactly how my mom uses it). It is not for doing work, I pleaded. All to no avail. Steve Jobs must be turning in his grave, I thought. My dad argued that while he may be in the minority on how he wants to use the iPad, surely it can’t be a microscopic minority. Why else were there so many iPad compatible keyboards out there, he asked? Why else does Google throw up so many keyboard options? Good questions. Ironically, the answer to both questions lies in the existence of the Internet. The surfing of which was the “intended use” of the iPad! In the pre-Internet era, people with non-mainstream tastes in anything (music, movies, topics, and, as it turns out, uses of iPad): 1)       Could not find each other easily; 2) ...

I started reading this book by Niall Ferguson titled Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire . The first quote in the book was by Thomas Jefferson and I loved it: “Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can.” How prophetic! The reason I picked up the book was that I don’t consider America an empire; so I was curious. Ferguson seemed to know most readers wouldn’t either, so he went to extraordinary lengths to change the definition of empire from what the British/Spanish/French had to, well, something. It didn’t make any sense and my eyes glazed. Then he quoted American military bases in Japan and Germany as signs of an empire. Really? Did Ferguson check whether the Japanese wanted the US to leave so they could be walked over by the Soviets first and the Chinese today? If you really want a foreign army on your soil, it’s not called an occupation. As you might have gu...

I read this article by Joseph Epstein on why we don’t seem to have any geniuses nowadays. When he said that most consider Albert Einstein as the last modern genius, I agreed. Until I read the rest of his article. And then I agreed with Friedrich Nietzsche that the belief in genius is just a “superstitious belief”! So what is genius? Of course, there’s no standard answer to that question. Otherwise, we wouldn’t call people from so many diverse fields (Plato and Aristotle; Bach and Beethoven; Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; Newton and Darwin; Ramanujan; and Shakespeare) as geniuses, would we? Then there are the evil geniuses like Hitler and Stalin…and geniuses that are “considered the intellectual equivalent of false messiahs”, like Karl Marx. Which is why I agree with Epstein that the only definition that seems to work is Schopenhauer’s: “Talent is like the marksman who hits a target, which others cannot reach. Genius is like the marksman who hits a target, which others...

My parents were considering buying a second desktop for themselves. Second as in “addition to”, not as in “replacement of”. Why? For two reasons (this is just my opinion; I could be totally wrong): 1)       The existing desktop is getting old and might conk out sooner rather than later; 2)       One device ain’t enough for two people! My father was considering a laptop as an option. That is when my wife told me to suggest the tablet option to them. I did; and initially, they were wary of how easy or difficult typing without a (physical) keyboard might be. They then Googled to learn that they could plug in a physical keyboard to a tablet. I was amused by how my dad knew about iPad and Android as the only two options (I guess he learnt about Android from the book I lent him and, surprisingly, one he actually read: Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution ). I pushed them hard to buy the iPad rather th...

The first football World Cup I saw was the one in 1990. I sat up late for the midnight matches, argued over who would win or who played better. During the 2002 World Cup, I even went home from office to watch the Brazil v/s England quarter-final, the final before the final (every tournament has one such match). But the current World Cup barely has me interested. I don’t even sit through a match that starts at 9:30! Signs of old age? Or has the Internet changed everything? I always feel “Why watch a match that may be goal-less anyway? Why not just see the goals on YouTube the next day?” And yet, I watch Argentina’s matches (ok, I just watch more of their matches than the others’). But only to see Lionel Messi. I come away feeling that while the guy is awesome, he just produces 3 or 4 instances of magic in the entire match (it’s a different matter that those instances are sufficient to win the match). So is he over-hyped, I wondered? Or over-marked? Or is Barcelona a better tea...

When I was a kid, a Hollywood blockbuster would take months to come to India (if at all). Same with TV shows. Now, simultaneous worldwide releases are becoming quite common. And at times, even big name movies, like the recently released The Amazing Spider-Man 2 gets released in India before the US! TV shows are getting broadcast in India within days (or a week or two) of the US/BBC broadcast. The reasons are easy to see: there is no longer the constraint of only so many reels; digital content can be sent almost instantly to any corner of the planet; and if they wait too long, people would have already seen the pirated version. But with music, the digital medium has changed things in a different way. Describing Beyoncé’s last album released on 13 Dec last year, David Hepworth points out something very strange : “The window of ballyhoo around a big album, which in the past would have lasted a couple of months, was finished in a week, leaving the rest of us wondering whether ...

Remember those “What is your mother’s maiden name?” kind of questions standard to all websites when you forget your password? Well, here’s the latest addition to that list: To Hudson’s question as to whether such a question is inappropriate, John Herrman said that perhaps it just means that the US has completed its recovery from 9/11. He even termed it (what else?) “web healing”! So is 9/11 the new “Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?” question? Or is this, as Herrman wonders, the last of the “Where were you when…” questions. After all, he says: “Should something horrible or memorable happen tomorrow, your answer to the equivalent question in 14 years will probably be, "I don't know, on the internet?"” Or maybe we could ask Google or Apple to pull out our GPS logs to give us the answer!

We've all heard of or even experienced analysis paralysis, where we overthink something to the point where we can't make any decision. At such times, some people envy the ignorant, who just go ahead and do something...and sometimes, they even succeed! Somehow going ignorant never sounded like any solution to me. I am sure that even the “if only we could go back to before Eve bit the apple” crowd would squirm if CEO's and politicians said they made major decisions only by intuition. Which is why Ian Leslie's article on the topic appealed to me. To overcome analysis paralysis, he suggests developing “the ability to apply years of learning at the crucial moment by removing one’s thinking self from the equation”. Or as he paraphrases German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer: “one has to be skilled at ignoring information”. Leslie uses the word “unthink” to describe the above technique. And as he rightly warns: “Unthinking is not the same as ignorance; you can’t ...